Shadow Dancer, Seven magazine review

Andrea Riseborough is superb in James Marsh's flawed IRA thriller, set during
the Troubles of the 1990s

Shadow Dancer isJames Marsh’s film of the Northern Ireland thriller of the same name by the ITN political editor Tom Bradby. It begins with a searing scene from 1973 – agonisingly accurate in both tone and texture - in which young Collette McVeigh persuades her little brother to carry out her errand to buy their father cigarettes.

In his absence, she plays with her kit for beading necklaces and turns up the music on the radio to daydream to, such that she can’t hear the sound of crossfire outside their terraced house. Her little brother is carried home dead, and the beading and dreaming stops forever.

McVeigh (played as an adult by Andrea Riseborough) and her other brothers go on to join the IRA, but, by 1993, she has a beloved small son and a dwindling appetite for IRA operations.

Compromised by her role in a London bombing attempt, she is open to persuasion by an MI5 agent (Clive Owen) who offers her the choice of 25 years in prison or work as an informant. Back in Belfast, she is also in the sights of Kevin Mulville (played with lingering menace by David Wilmot), a suspicious IRA internal investigator.

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Riseborough is superb – pale, secretive, stubborn and quietly terrified as the trap tightens around her – and she catches the Belfast accent flawlessly. The pace is controlled and the painterly cinematography frames anxious faces beneath grey skies, but somehow the heartbeat is not quickened as sickeningly fast as it should be when the action dips deeper into the murky world of British and IRA intelligence.

Bradby was an ITN reporter in Belfast, but for those of us who grew up in that cagey city during the Troubles there might be a few too many credibility gaps in the film – particularly Owen’s dashing MI5 officer, who always meets McVeigh at the same rather exposed location while wearing a smart suit and tie to ensure he cannot blend in with working-class locals, and who calls up the McVeigh family home to impart a crucial piece of information without even checking he’s got the right woman on the line.

It might sound like nitpicking, but the devil lies in the details, and sometimes the authentic smell of fear does, too.

This review also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph